Thinking about ChromeOS

I have read what many pundits have to say about the Chrome OS. I have read what they had to say before and after the press conference and, there is a bewildering array of opinions.


The computers that comply with the hardware specifications, will have to deal with Wave and as netbooks are often considered as computers with insufficient specifications, I expect that there will be a range of hardware ready for "must have" applications and I expect that they will all do nicely. Wave has improved a lot in stability and performance in the last months anyway..

There is much ado about "market share". I do not really care except that I expect it to become important for the adoption of open standards. Important as well is that Chrome OS is a Linux distribution, it is open source. As developers of Canonical are involved in the development of Chrome OS, it is obvious that Linux development in general will benefit.

With Chrome OS user data will be very much stored on the web, local storage will be very much a cache that can and will be deleted when need be. My "wet dream" for Wave is still a possibility, I however want it not just as part of a Chrome OS, but also as part of the browser and not just the Chrome browser.
Thanks,
GerardM

My Wave wet dream

I have been asked several times where I see Wave go. The last time I was asked where I see Wave in 5 years time.. not Internet years. What I did was look hard at Wave for what it does, and look at Google for the kind of things it has been doing.

For me, Wave is an environment where the functionality of e-mail, chat, wiki comes together. What we have done in the MediaWikiWave project is provide Wave with a publishing back end. This is something that MediaWiki does really well. I expect that Wave will continue to integrate parts of the puzzle that is computer software and data.

Google is getting into operating systems with its Chrome OS. Add to this Moore's law and in five years time a computer with Chrome OS, with over a terabyte of storage is not a wild idea at all.

When something like a terabyte is used for caching, I can imagine that this cache is maintained by Wave. In this cache you find e-mail, Wavelets, Wiki pages and other information that is of interest to a user. Wave being Wave, will cache this information and updates it in the background. This information will be available on request.

Wave in its architecture allows for multiple servers. It is not necessary to know on what server a particular Wavelet is available. I think that a user is not that interested in any particular server, he is interested in the data being available. Only when the data is manipulated is there a need for immediate feed back to servers or other computers.

I think this is doable. Part of the cache is already there in Google Gears and this makes this vision evolutionary progress.
Thanks,
GerardM